4:48 Psychosis: A curiosity, a crackup

Saw "4:48 Psychosis" last night at the Gamm Theater, in Pawtucket. A 72-minute one act about a total and complete mental breakdown, only 2 characters, with the patient being by far the lead/central character. This play is more of a curiosity than a drama. I've heard that the playwright killed herself in an institution and left this work as an unfinished fragment (she'd written other plays). This adds a certain, I don't know, poignancy or chill to 4:48, in that it truly is a document of despair. But is it worth seeing? I don't really think so. It's a rant, essentially, without any shape or form or direction. A play needs to be based on some kind of conflict and it has to move from one point to another, that is, the characters or at least the protagonist has to grow or change - or maybe we have to grow or change. Other than, at the end, when I felt terribly sorry for this woman and I had more of a sense of the torment of mental illness, had I really learned or experienced anything? There are much better and more sophisticated and thoughtful works about mental illness, many of them, e.g., Girl, Interrupted. At least 4:48 didn't succumb to the cliched story of psychiatrist sicker than patient, etc. (though it hints at such, in one of the few actual exhanges in the play). But it would have benefited from more "sessions" with the therapist, or, failing that, more clear revelations from the patient. After the show, with some friends, we (working therapists in the group particularly) made some attempts at diagnosis, based on hints and fragments - but frankly the material wasn't there to make sense of the patient's condition. It's admirable in a way that it didn't decide into a trite family history of abuse as cause of all contemporary woes, etc., but the material just feels raw, undigested, which it probably is, and I think left us with sense of witnessing a crackup, or the aftereffects of a crackup more accurately, without any sense of the human life contained within the rantings and ravings. We also discussed movies with sympathetic views of analysts. Ordinary People. 10. Others?

Damages - a note - episode 6

The craziness continues but maybe the fog lifts on a few issues: yes, Frobisher is working with Patti, probably to get some money, also for some reason because of an animus toward Kendrick of UNR. The corruption in the police department deeper than we'd thought, as Ellen's sister realizes a cop had been following her, and we see that this cop was one of the men who'd killed Ellen's fiance (along with the detective whom we see in many scenes). The detective kills the other cop. And Kendrick seems to be plotting to kill someone else, as well. There's a complicated class-action suit developing against Kendrick and UNR, with Frobisher as the lead (secrety) plantiff. Hm. What further twists? Patti's "Uncle Pete" being set up as the worst of the bad guys, the true mastermind who for some reason tried to kill Ellen (for Patti) and now wants Patti to fire Ellen. There has to be another twist here - perhaps he, too, is an FBI plant, trying to nail Patti? The FBI guys continue to back off from Ellen, for some reason. And, Ellen goes back to the old apartment, the murder scene, and a neighbor delivers a package supposedly from her late finace. Oddly, she doesn't open the gift. It must be signficant, but we don't know why. Do the writers?

Ellen holds her ground - Damages

5th episode of Damages, season 2. As Marge points out, everyone and everything is suspicious. We see for certain in this episode that someone that Uncle Pete (Patti's henchman) hired tried to kill Ellen; Pete gives they guy getaway money. We see that Pete does not trust Ellen and is trying to convince Patti not to. We see that the guy from group (Wes) who has been interested in Ellen is following her around, with another guy, and reporting somehow back to Patti. We see that Daniel Purcell (Hurt) is taking money from Ultima Resources (energy company), but seems to want to stop. Ultima Resources able to influence government regulators, obviously. Their ceo, played by the deputy chief from the Wire, is a nasty thug. Patti's husband having an affair. All that is on the surface - but what's beneath the surface? In keeping with the style and spirit of damages, only about half of these observations will prove to be accurate by the end of the season. Maybe Uncle Pete is really working for the FBI. Maybe Daniel Purcell is really a spy for the EPA. Maybe Patti's really working for the ACLU. Maybe my television set is really recording my innnermost thoughts. Anything's possible. The mind truly cannot hold in one place at one time all the plot elements of this series - and yet, and yet, it's so compelling and smart, the acting the writing the visual style, that you have to keep watching. Particularly strong scenes in my view are those with just Ellen and Patti, as Patti pushes and tests to see if Ellen is spying (she is), and Ellen shrewdly protects herself with terrific alibis and retorts. You'd think she'd fold and wilt before the unflappable Pattie Hewes, but she holds her ground, so far.

Who's your daddy? - Damages

The melodrama taking upper hand in the 4th episode, as Patti (Close) tells her son that Purcell (Hurt) is his father, and the two meet and speak for the first time. As is always the case with damages, a ton more plot elements crashing about here - still always fascinating, and hard to follow but impossible not to watch. Ellen and Tom head to West Virginia to learn more about the corporate malfeasance of UNR (energy firm). Despite rather cliched threats from smalltown cops and rednecks, they get out unscathed, and with a water sample, no less. Oddly, Patti asks Purcell (he's a scientist) to test the water. Why would she do that?, Marge wondered. Seems like a stupid thing to do, as we learn, when we see him dump the sample and then, during a show-cause hearing, testify that UNR has done nothing wrong and has not falsified his lb reports (which we know that they have done). This astonishes Patti, she leaves the court in a fury. But we've learned that she's always a step ahead of us, and maybe she know Purcell would shaft her. Bigger question is, why did he let it go so far? Why did he agree to test the water and to begin the proceedings against UNR? (Maybe to get it thrown out at an early stage?) We learn two crucial facts about Purcell: he was complicit in the murder of his wife, and in setting it up to look like a junkie did it. And, he's being secretly paid (off) by UNR and/or his own consulting firm. It's just unclear at this point why he has anything to do with Patti at all - it can't be good for him.

Headless Woman - Amazing Movie

No surprise to me to see that Pedro Almadovar was one of the producers of this Argentine movie, The Headless Woman, because it does, as his movies do, focus so intently on a female lead character, literally never leaving her point of view (except for the opening sequence). Plot summary very simple: she (Vero - does it mean truth?) is driving on a country road, turns to do something (pick up sunglasses), strikes someone or something (never completely clear, at least to her),stops for an anguished moment, then drives away. The movie follows her for the next week. It appears she has completely lost her memory, whether through physical trauma or shock, not clear at first. What's amazing about the film is that we see things and people exactly as she does. Like her, we have no idea who these characters are. She's like us, in other words, trying to make sense of this movie. Which guy is her husband? Which is her brother? In one great sequence, a maid tells her they're waiting for her at the office. It's obvious Vero doesn't know what office, where. A cab takes her to a dental clinic. She sits down in the waiting area, among some kids. An assistant say, they're waiting for you. She's the dentist. Totally befuddled. Just as life is not easy for her, this film is not easy for us - but it's totally compelling. Shot with a lot of handheld, poorly lit, very amateurish look to it, no backgound music at all except for ambient sound. Gradually, she gets some memory back and her life moves along - but that's only one aspect of the film. It's not just a pyschological thriller, but also, as Marge noted while we were watching, it's a political story. The kid she struck (apparently - never 100% clear) is a poor kid from a tiny village, perhaps Indian. Nobody really cares that much how he died, the police aren't pursuing this at all, and Vero's family is well able to cover the traces of her accident. They're interested only in clearing her of suspicion. And - she's a good person, runs dental clinics for the poor. It's a story of fate and of moral and ethical decisions. Short, not pretty, totally compelling.

A touch of melodrama in Damages

The 3rd episode of season 2, Damages, introduces a melodramatic element, which most viewers could see coming across the horizon - William Hurt character (what's his name?) turns out to be the father of Patti's son. That kind of plot twist seems out of keeping with the harsh and sinister mood of the series, but so be it - it does explain why Patti was willing to come to his aid (though not why she had never told her son about his paternity). We continue to be suspicious of the FBI guys, who ask Ellen to lie low on her sting operation against Patti. It's becoming increasingly a whodunit, as we really don't know who killed Hurt's wife - probably not him, probably not the mysterious intruder who'd threatened him, possibly (Marge's suggestion) someone Hurt hired to do the job (we do see that someone is pawning his wife's ring). Why Hurt would tell the cops about the ring remains mysterious. As does why he would try to flee the country. Again, you have to wonder whether the writers even knew the answers, although they presumably had the larger arc of the story sketched out? New element introduced of an investigative reporter checking out environmental damage in w.va. that multinational energy company (Hurt's client?) may be causing. Who put him on the case? Still a great series and you literally can't drift off for a second while you're watching it, but it's almost impossible to hold all the plot strands in mind at any one time! Rose Byrne, actress playing Ellen, looks incredibly haggard - maybe appropriate for the part (grieving, stressed, in a vise) but painful to look at her at times.

Damages is always a step ahead of you

Because just when you think Patti has made a mistake - in this case, episode 2 of season 2 - giving the purloined scientific reports to a scientist friend who, we shortly see, has ratted Patti out to the head of the evil corporation that's trying to kill William Hurt (don't even ask), we see that Patti (Glenn Close) gave out the documents because she knew he would rat her out and she wanted her opponent, some huge energy consortium, as it turns out, to come out into the open. Kinda cool to see Glenn Close and William Hurt acting together, as they did alomst their first work together in The Big Chill a million years ago. Oddly, I kept thinking I'd seen Glenn Close first in Secaucus 7, but she wasn't in that, it turns out. We continue, in episode 2, to jump around in time and to find multiple reasons to hold every single character in suspicion. Anyone could be lying or double-crossing, a set-up or a spy. It's now obvious, however, that the guy from the grief group who's interested in Ellen has some kind of ulterior motive - perhaps he, too, wants revenge against the Frobisher corp., which killed Ellen's fiance (apparently). But maybe that's not it at all. He keeps guns and news clips about Frobisher, and he certainly encourages Ellen to act out her revenge fantasy and kill Frobisher (which she doesn't do). But why? Also, it's more obvious that one of the two FBI guys working with Ellen (to get to Patti) is suspicious. Tom, Patti's assistant, has always been a weasel - one of the less credible aspects of the story is why Patti would have kept him on so long and how he rose so high in her firm (though she never lets him lead a case, understandably).

Can't stop watching Damages

Damages (Season 2) remains one of the most watchable, addictive shows on TV. Though Glenn Close gets all the attention (deservedly, she's amazing) and you can't take your eyes of her, she owns every scene she's in, there's more to the series. First of all,there's probably nothing on TV that has such a complex and constantly surprising plot (excepting obvious stunt series like Lost, which I don't watch). It's amazing how many elements are included in each episode, and it takes a ton of concentration just to follow what's going on and try to keep it all in your head. You can't, really, and I'm not sure the writers can, either - I sometimes have the uncomfortable feeling they're winging it. Nobody wants to believe that! We want to believe that the guys who write this show, this kind of show, are totally in control all the time and know exactly where they're heading, that we're in good hands, but it's not always true, often not true (think Mulholland Drive for example - clearly had no idea what would happen from scene to scene). The season one recap took more than 15 minutes! But we wouldn't pay such close attention if it weren't so exciting and interesting - watching Close's devious mind at work: she's a tort attorney, class actions, who goes after the bad guys but will stop at nothing, literally, to win her case. Even at end of season one we're not sure how culpable she might be - in a murder, and one attempted murder - though we know she drove one man to suicide through blackmail threats, and may have ruined other innocent lives as well. Season 2 opens w a very funny stunt cast with Regis and Kelly Ripa. After first episode, I'm back in the mode - suspicious of everything and everyone.

The Awful Truth - dated, but charming

On Andy's suggestion watched Cary Grant vehicle The Awful Truth (1937?), very stagey, very dated both cinematically and in the world it evokes (Manhattan of dance clubs and beautiful apartments with doormen and elevator boys, everyone "dresses" all the time, men in heavy wool suits, ugh, and hats - which become an important prop). Grant plays a fairly typical role for him, a witty, charming, somewhat goofy, quite irresponsible, lovable, wealthy guy, in contrast to the square, doltish, dull suitor/rival (Ralph Bellamy?). In fact, this role, for both actors I think, is a warm-up (maybe a reprise, I'm not sure of the dates) for the much better His Girl Friday. That movie's better largely because Grant has something to do in life, he's a newspaper editor, there's a big story breaking, and he wants his ex to come back to work as a "newspaperman" and not go off to Albany to marry the square. In The Awful Truth, nobody really has any work to do; the whole story is about the improbable divorce that we know will never come to be. Still, lots of great lines and some very funny slapstick (Grant breaking apart a chair and as he tries to sit down quietly during a private recital). And some great bits with a really cute dog. Some of the dialog and the end is Stoppard-like: Things would be different if you were just the same. I'm different now, and that's why everything's the same. And the like. Odd how the story is left morally open, a bit risque for its era: we never actually learn why Grant was pretending to be in Florida for a two-week spell. I was sure there'd be some exculpatory explanation but I guess, no, we just accept that he was in fact cheating on his wife. It's easy to forget what a great comic actor he was - and he could play the square, too (e.g., Bringing up Baby).

Gomorrah - Like The Wire (but without cops)

An anti-travelogue. You will not want to visit Naples. This movie, about the mafia in Naples, is really fast-paced, extremely violent, hard to stop watching, and hard to follow. It shows the broad reach of organized crime in Naples (maybe anywhere?) by following several stories along parallel paths: a war between rival gangs for control of a decrepit housing project, the initiation of a young boy into the gang, two cowboys who think that go out on their own within the gang-controlled projects, control of the fashion (tailoring) industry, disposal of hazardous waste. Each story is really compelling though at times it's hard to keep them straight as our intro to each of the main characters is quick and sketchy. This film does not reach out to you - you have to reach out to it. It has a documentary look and feel - lots of hand-held camera work, lots of dark lighting and awkward angles. But always fascinating to look at, some amazing and almost iconographic sequences (car crash in cemetery, two young thugs blasting bullets across a beach, the bag man pacing the long open walkways that crisscross the housing project, the Italian tailor entering the Asian dressmaking sweatshop where he will teach them the trade (they applaud him like a god). Gomorrah, a multiplot story, is like that fakeroo Crash - but this one's real and effective, not sentimental mush. It's like the Wire in some way, but as if the Wire were done entirely from the gang POV and almost entirely from within the tenements. Other than an occasional passing squad car that of course never stops, there is no police or law-enforcement presence at all in Gomorrah. It's a world unto itself.

The Cove

This is a very good documentary that does a good job making you want to go to the Mystic Aquarium and free the dolphins. Why not carry it all the way and free all the fish as well? Left me feeling puzzled and morally compromised. The dolphin slaughter that we see in this film is horrific (I have to admit that I missed part of the movie, fell asleep, no fault of the film, I was just dead tired), but there's a weird contradiction at the heart of the film. As pointed out, the very cuteness of the dolphins, the appearance of the smile, is what has made them such valuable attractions in seaquariums, and has led, in part, to the slaughter thousands of other dolphins. Of course it's this very cuteness that makes us watch this film and want the dolphins to be freed. Shouldn't we also free the less cute, less intelligent mammals? If we're repulsed by eating dolphin meat - setting aside its apparent mercury contamination - what aren't we repulsed by eating pork? salmon? No easy answers in this film, or in life. The Cove is pretty well made, and begins with a lot of excitement - there appears to be incredible hostility against in Taiji, Japan, against the westerners who are there to protect the dolphins, and the police seem to follow them all the time - but this doesn't explain how on earth they were able to sneak into the dolphin cove (at night) at least twice to place underwater cameras and generally go ahead with the whole process of making the film. Somehow, I think in America this could not have happened. The Japanese seem to think that merely telling the filmmakers to stay off restricted ground will stop the project. Very naive - or maybe the film didn't give us the whole picture. Were they (the film crew) really as endangered as the film made them out to be?

Oh, Brothers.

Brothers qualifies as one of those better-than-I-expected-it-to-be's. So many ways it could have gone wrong, could have veered into the movie cliche, but it doesn't. The good brother v bad brother (cf Brotherhood, East of Eden, probably millions of books and films), the domineering military father (cf anything by Pat Conroy), falling for the brother's girlfriend/wife, returning vet can't adjust to civilization (cf Coming Home et al.), and others. Despite all these familiar tropes, Brothers makes its own way. Pretty smart script - if you can get beyond one crucial totally impossibility (how could the main character, Sam, be reported as killed in action, military funeral and all, without any body recovery? Wouldn't he have been listed as MIA - and no movie?). Acting's very good across the board, from the exceptionally cute kids to a terrific Sam Shepherd as the Vietnam vet grandad. True, Toby Maguire (as a tough Marine) and Jake Gyllenhall(sp?) as an ex-con are ludicrously miscast, but they play their big scenes really well. Makes me curious about the source, a Danish film - which I bet is even better, for a lot of reasons, more understate I bet - also, in this film, everyone watching obviously knows that Toby Maguire is not killed in the first 15 minutes; perhaps with (unknown?) Danish actors we might be surprised by that plot twist. Great, painful blowout scene near the end when Maguire tears apart the remodeled kitchen; his breakdown throughout is extremely unnerving. Film also gets props for an underplayed, ambiguous ending. Deserved more of an audience, but hey, no animated war heros, in fact no war heros at all, so what do you really expect?

A little more on the The Lovely Bones

...because what makes both book and movie so disturbing? In ways that I think the author/director do not exactly intend? The story takes on one of the most horrible crimes imaginable, the murder of a young girl, and ostensibly tries to help us come to terms with that, to in a sense feel that the girl is okay, in her afterlife. But really, short of a profound religious faith, which the book/movie do not touch upon, there's really no way for this to be so. Families can heal, they can move forward with their lives a little, but they will always be grievously wounded after a crime like this. What made this story so sensation was its supernaturality. It is anything but a crime story. In fact, the mechanics of the crime, deterctive work, punishment are handled perfunctorily at best. But did anyone actually feel "good" reading/seeing this? Do you feel in any way that justice has been done, that the universe is sound and whole? In a way, I think, you actually feel worse. The vision of an afterlife brings neither joy nor salvation in any way, just a strange lonely wandering and a feeble and spooky reach down into the goings-on of life, a terrible longing and loneliness. In the book, the febrile style masked some of the flaws in the emotional structure, but the movie makes the horrible nature (or supernature) of her being too real and concrete and we feel, or at least I felt, that the story was a tragedy and the vision of an afterlife was a horror, and I think the director (and Sebold) want me, us to feel exactly the opposite.

What's so lovely about this?

If you liked the novel The Lovely Bones you might possibly like the movie too, though I doubt it. To me, Sebold's novel was more of a concept than a narrative. I understand what she's getting at, trying to articulate some kind of palliative for the pain of the unbearable, in this case the murder of a child. But her idea of having the murdered child narrate the story from some kind of afterlife, from which she intervenes on earth to variously protect others from assault by her murderer and ultimately to effect his demise just makes the book creepy. The movie is the same if not worse. Its vision of life after death consists of the murder victims roaming through unpopulated, cartoonish landscapes and seascapes (the vision of Peter Jackson, director, totally pedestrian and devoid of beauty and imagination; didn't the afterlife look exactly the same in that bad Robin Williams movie?), no adults, no society, lonely and scary. If this is their eternity, it's worse than life and worse than hell, it would terrify any child. If you can put aside the improbabilities of the murder itself and the spiritual claptrap that leads a family member - but, oddly, never the detective on the case? - to id the killer, what's left? A sprawling, meandering, never-ending movie with probably the most melodramatic soundtrack ever composed and some editing so bad, so clumsy (to supposedly build tension, it seems to make 45 minutes for one of the characters to lift a bedroom floorboard while the killer pokes about downstairs) that I actually laughed. The bright spot is the acting - all good, including the lead character in I think her first role, and all wasted.

Fem-porn? It's Complicated.

Assuming that Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin have seen It's Complicated, I'm probably the 3rd guy in America to watch this film. Okay, it's not meant for me and I'm not the target demo., but I may as well weigh in. Have you seen that really funny giftshop calendar, called something like Porno for Women? Has pictures of very hunky guys saying stuff like: Let's set the heat permanently on tropical!, and I can watch the game anytime, let's check out the figure skating. That's kind of what this movie's about: 50ish woman (Streep) hooks up with ex-husband (Baldwin), he's doting and absolutely crazy about her, in fact "takes a heart" (as we say in R.I.) when he sees her frontal naked. He pleads to come back to her, wants to leave his sexy but nasty wife and her brat kid. Streep is anguished, starts dating a sweet but dull guy (Martin). Her kids swarm around her and basically just huddle together, as if their entire lives are focused on parents and home (they're all 20plus, btw). Most striking of all, she lives in a fabulous house in Santa Barbara, magazine furnished, ocean views, pool (we don't see this touch till late in the movie). And it's not good enough! She's putting on an addition - "it took me ten years to do this" "at last I can have a real kitchen." Excuse me? Take a look at the kitchen she's got now and weep. Have to wonder whether the filmmaker (Meyer? Meyers - her previous film, with Nicholson and Keaton, touched all these same notes) shrewdly calculate this to play to our fantasies (rich people suffer as much as we do!) or that they are so insulated that to them, this is poverty. We're supposed to feel sorry for Streep when she books two doubles at a very high end nyc hotel - her ex (traveling separately of course) books a suite with park views. Sad moment when she flops onto a bed in her double. Oh, please. Baldwin supposedly a lawyer, though never seems to work. Streep owns a bakery, and her job seems like fun! For her. She's getting to be a pretty good cook, on film. She seems to spend about five minutes a day there, pouring lattes and sashaying through the kitchen with orders to the staff like : Let's make breakfast more fun! Somehow, this bakery supports her lifestyle? She must own Starbucks. Obvious creeaky narrative explanation regarding Baldwin's adopted 3-year-old brat kid - makes me think in earlier version he was Baldwin's kid but it would be too damning of his character if he were abandoning his own kid so they forced something in about his wife (Agness, cq) left him, had the kid, came back to him, huh? Okay, overall, harmless fantasy stuff, and god knows there's plenty of macho fantasy film out there as well. But couldn't it have been slightly realistic? or funnier? You can't get laughs out of a scene with Steve Martin and Meryl Streep stoned together? Something's gotta give.

The best brothers

The two best brothers doing films today? Not the Coens, but the Dardennes, the Belgian guys who have made some really great movies about real people, the down and out, on the margins of society, in the industrial flatlands of Belgium, spectators upon the prosperity of the EEC. They've done a trilogy, of sorts, The Son (I think that was the title), the amazing L'enfant, and what I saw last night, Lorna's Silence (maybe they should have called it "The Mother," which would complete the trilogy of titles and would make a lot of sense, as much of the story concerns whether Lorna is pregnant or not). These movies are unrelentless, unflinching, and uncompromising. They never narrate a back story. It's as if you jump right into Lorna's life and you figure things out as you go along, exactly as if a camera were attached to your shoulder, right now, and the movie would begin, and how long would it take for viewers to learn who you are, where you're from, what makes you tick? But it's not like documentary or reality TV, because these films take on a person in crisis, faced with an incredibly difficult moral decision, and they follow the plot through to its sometimes (not always) terrible conclusion. I won't say too much about the plot because part of the beauty and challenge of this film is to let it unfold before you and to figure out what's happening as more "pieces of the puzzle" come into view. I found it totally credible, sad, smart, and challenging. Is anybody in America making movies that are anywhere near as smart as these? (Maybe the guys who did Chop Shop and Man Push Cart). They're like small novels, and they're windows on people among us whom we walk write by, dismiss, ignore. I hope these guys make many more great films!

Bruno v Borat

I admit that I watched Bruno and actually laughed a few times, though it's not a good movie. The laughter is often at the expense of the innocents who have been punked, sometimes undeservedly. Still, Bruno's attempt to negotiated "middle eastern" peace, his appearance on an Oprah-like talk show, the session with the gay converter all pretty funny - plus some more outrageous scenes as well, e.g., Straight Dave cage fighting. However: why is this movie so much weaker than the hilarious Borat? It's the character, really - Borat was somehow blundering and lovable and perched neatly on the edge of credibility. You could almost imagine falling for his schtick yourself - an awkward eastern European journalist filming a doc about America. Bruno is credible only as an over-the-top comic character. That is, not at all, except in the realm of the most exagerrated form of reality TV. He's not likable. And he has no clear mission (story line) to propel and control the narrative of the film. He wants abstractedly to be "famous." So what? The movie wanders from place to place and topic to topic with nothing holding it together. Not surprising to see on the credits that four writers contributed - probably more, actually. Would have been better and sharper to stay in one setting and theme: Milan fashion, Hollywood celebrity, sexual encounters. The documentary motif was a good idea and could generate many good films (Michael Moore meets Sasha Baron Cohen).

Am I an anti-Coen?: Burn After Reading

I guess I must be. I generally don't care for Coen brothers movies (though I haven't seen all of them), and find their cruelty unbearable, their humor flat, and their literary allusions coy and pretentious. I particularly loathed A Serious Man, which, as friend Andy Wolk noted, Hitler could have made. Saw Burn After Reading last night, which as I understand it is one of the least successful of their movies, and, you know what?, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Nothing deep or profound, but just a very entertaining, clever, twisty story. Okay, it's not too original. And it does hinge on one or two extraordinarily improbable happenstances (a lost CD with valuable personal info, the absurd coincidence that brings links the two segments of the plot - when George Clooney picks up Frances McDormand through an Internet dating service). You have to accept that George Clooney would troll the net (though he's really good as a goofball), and Brad Pitt and McDormand are way, way too old for their parts. But the acting is good, esp. McDormand with her huge, expressive eyes and her friendly Midwest voice. None of it makes any sense or matters a hell of a lot, but it shows me, in a way, that these two brothers play at their best when the stakes are lower and they can be more relaxed.

District 9 - The Anti-Avatar

For a movie that calls to mind in various ways so many other movies, District 9 is somehow, surprisingly, an original - both a comic-book horror story with lots of video-game attack graphics, but also a political allegory in some way (could it have been made anywhere by S.Africa?) that inevitably forces us to think about Apartheid, the homeland settlements, the African slums (cf The Constant Gardener), and even the West Bank. But most of all it's a horror film in which the horror, the "monster," is an infection from the inside - Alien being the classic version of this, but more recently The Fly (the closest in mood to D 9), Iron Man (the hero becomes repulsive but superpowerful). And above all - it's the "anti-Avatar" - in this case earth (J-Burg) is "Pandoro," invaded by repulsive aliens, who live in an encampment. A human ventures in among them and becomes one of them, against his will - but here it's a horror story whereas in Avatar the Pandorans are attractive and wise, and the hero chooses to stay among them. The use of fast-paced news video at the outset reminded me of that Australian Romeo & Juliet of some years back, set in Mexico, and the whole mood, of the planet teetering on the brink, much like Children of Men. Obviously, it touches a lot of themes, and is a kind of avatar in and of itself - speaking to so many of our contemporary anxieties about changes in our planet, vulnerability to disease, contact with other civilizations. The battle scene, as almost always happens, went on far too long and was hard to follow (there's obviously a huge market for this), but otherwise a smart and disturbing movie.